> They still take the same money, but we have to pay more, so that ...

… smaller businesses who cannot evade taxes quite as easily may compete on a more level playing field.

You argue that it is harder for smaller business to evade tax and easier for big business. So the playing field will be levelled by decreasing tax not increasing it.

> "It's easier for a big corporation to break rules, so the playing field will be leveled by reducing the rules"

You're tackling tax-evasion by closing loopholes and increasing consequences for tax-evasion.

Decreasing taxes has no meaningful impact on the practice of tax-evasion, it doesn't "level" any playing field.

> Decreasing taxes has no meaningful impact on the practice of tax-evasion, it doesn't "level" any playing field.

Is there anything that backs this up?

Ceteris paribus, I would be far more willing to dodge a 99% tax than I would be to dodge a 1% tax.

I understand what you mean, but even in a thought-experiment it means you would have to lower the tax to the point that it's less economic for companies to maintain an already-existing tax-evasion scheme than just paying the tax.

Those companies would then still not play by the rules and contribute to society accordingly, you would have adjusted YOUR rules to match THEIR sole interest (which might be based on a completely different motivation).

The question is then: Is your (dramatically) lowered tax-income then still enough to serve its intended purpose (maintaining public goods etc)?

I think it's logical that if you define a set of rules for a society to live in and some of its members are so powerful that they can circumvent the rules, abandoning the rules is not addressing your actual problem.

I reckon it is better to make the game fair for all by closing holes and punishing rule-breakers, instead of allowing the powerful players to set the beneficial rules for themselves.

But again, I think that's more of an interesting general exchange than a discussion about this parent-topic ;)

The only aim we started was what will give small companies incentive, where I argued lowering tax is better for them.

If your only goal is to get short term public good, just ban all small companies, inceltivize government backed/owned monopoly and tax them heavily so that profit is just marginal. You would get lot of tax revenue in short term, but it will destroy economy in the long term. And it is not just as a theoretical example, there was an entire failed political movement for this.

Obviously like everything in life, there is a fine balance in tax rate and this knob has lot of consequence.

Isn't this more attributable to the high inflation rates currently? A roughly 10% increase corresponds to the 9.1% annual inflation (as of August 2022), with some margin for some previous years. Not to mention the USD/EUR rate, which also probably impacts them a bit. Which tax are you talking about?

Considering the amount of profits and cash reserves this company has, I don't see why some people are so opposed to taxing them. They're swimming in more money they can possibly use, what use is it? Close the loopholes and make them pay their fair share, they'll barely notice the difference anyway.

AppStore fees are percentage based, so they are index-linked by definition.

If prices go up due to inflation, so do Apple’s fees.

What loophole?

The one where a business gets to decide what they charge?

The free market loophole? The loophole where business pass costs on to customers?

Do you propose governments should set prices?

By "loopholes" I think they were referring to stuff like

>Apple relied on a “complex web of offshore entities” and U.S. tax loopholes to avoid paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore income over the past four years, according to excerpts from a Senate subcommittee report to be released tomorrow as Apple CEO Tim Cook testifies on the company’s overseas operations.

>The maker of iPhones and iPads used at least three foreign subsidiaries that it claims are not “tax resident in any nation” to help it avoid paying billions in “otherwise taxable offshore income,” the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a statement today.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/05/20/appl...

I love that this comment is a response to a pricing scheme where developers are forced into pricing brackets. Apple are effectively hindering developers selling their apps on a free market.

But they also, you know, made the platform. Are you sure the platform would be there without their fees? Let's have a look at the Linux phone market...

Ok, why do they not force fees on apps that run on their MacOS platform then? Or what about their WebKit platform?

Seems like they've chosen a different business model back then and since it didn't work out so well (compare Mac/macOS market penetration to iPhone/iOS) they changed it to something that allows them to capture more revenue and use the money to develop the platform much further.

And they're not forcing it on Mac because that would cause outrage and people not upgrading the OS, and desktop/laptop computers are dying anyways.

Also, App Store on Mac definitely has fees.

Perfectly understandable IMHO.

(Webkit might be a platform to Google but it's not from Apple's point of view, it's merely one part of their platform offerings)

TIL that producing MacBooks isn’t a good business.

Yes, it's much much smaller than the iPhone business. Of course, it'd be a huge company by itself, but Apple got to $1T thanks to iPhone, not Mac - by far.

Except app store is not free market but monopoly. So it should be treated like one. The moment sideloading/root or alternative appstores are allowed - then then can charge whatever they feel like.

Vendor lock in is bad towards the customer so limiting it actually increases the free market.

What you think of is Laissez-faire

No, this is not even remotely close to a monopoly.

Yes, Apple can dictate terms in its own store the same way that your local grocer can.

When Android has 75% market share and multiple competing stores, we’re not even close to monopoly.

>Yes, Apple can dictate terms in its own store the same way that your local grocer can.

Would be all well and awesome if you had any freedom of choice on Apple's platform and weren't forced into being locked into their ecosystem where you pay a 15% Apple tax on every purchase. Say what you like about mobile platforms but making ridiculous comparisons like this doesn't help your case.

> Would be all well and awesome if you had any freedom of choice on Apple's platform

I don’t see how that is an argument against ”Yes, Apple can dictate terms in its own store the same way that your local grocer can.”. You don’t have freedom of choice as to who to buy from at your local grocer, either.

I think that, in principle, companies creating a market should be able to decide what gets sold there and demand any cut of sales they want.

That also is what I think laws say in most countries. It’s fairly normal with game consoles, for example, and I expect you can’t sell merchandise from studios competing with Disney (if they still exist) in Disneyland or sell ice cream there without Disney taking a significant cut, or sell Shell products at an Exxon pump.

The big question, though, is whether the market power of a few players in mobile apps is so undesirable that action is necessary, and if so, whether existing laws are sufficient to correct the issue, or whether the rules of the game should change and if so, how.

I think law will be changed, but how, I’m not sure about. Any law saying “this applies only to companies Foo, Bar and Baz” will be shut down in courts, so arguments must be formulated as to what exactly is wrong with the current situation, and decisions will have to be made as to whether those rules also should apply to, for example, game consoles.

> You don’t have freedom of choice as to who to buy from at your local grocer, either.

Exactly, and this isn't a problem because you have plenty of choice as to which grocer you patronize.

There are plenty of mobile app stores. If you don't like Apple's, then grab an Android and use Amazon's.

There should be a hard right that owner of general purpose devices decides what kind of software runs on them. Not the vendor.

Entire business models that most of society are perfectly happy with would disappear. I would include myself in that.

I say this just so that people with strong opinions on HN remember there are two sides to every coin.

> forced into being locked into their ecosystem

Who is forced into using their ecosystem?

So is it a “tax” when every other retail store doesn’t sell at cost?”

Well, we just had a real judge with a real law degree that said the App Store is not a monopoly in the Epic vs Apple case.

Good to know. It's good that judges are never wrong.

Do you have relevant case law that you can cite that the well paid Epic lawyers missed that would have been more convincing?

Microsoft EU antitrust case.

luckily we have real lawyers that don’t just pull up irrelevant cases. The case in both the US and the EU was about MS forcing OEMs to psy for a license on all shipping computers whether or not the computer shipped with Windows.

Apple doesn’t license its operating system to other OEMs, it doesn’t have anywhere near 90% market share and EU case law is irrelevant in the US.

> In 1993, the American software company Novell claimed that Microsoft was blocking its competitors out of the market through anti-competitive practices. The complaint centered on the license practices at the time which required royalties from each computer sold by a supplier of Microsoft's operating system, whether or not the unit actually contained the Windows operating system.

Luckily seems you have forgotten about the Internet Exporer

And absolutely nothing changed about IE in the US - no browser choice, no forced unbundling, nothing.

So here I thought the free market always finds the lowest price based on supply and demand and costs had very little to do with it.

Cost is the largest factor of the supply curve…

I don't get why Apple should pay for the disastrous policies of the EU?

Apple doesn't have to pay anything, nobody is holding a gun to it's head, or forcing it to participate in the European market.

The EU market will suffer this. Not apple. EU people will have to pay more for the apps. Apple will still make same many, just as before. If you say: "yeah, but now less people is going to buy" I say: I do not think so, the increment is small enough, that if you need or want the app or game, you still pay it. The theory behind this is, that the EU will give back that money for the EU people, invested in Internet infrastructure or whatever... The problem is that in the middle that money will have to pay for TONS of bureaucrats...

I was replying to "Considering the amount of profits and cash reserves this company has, I don't see why some people are so opposed to taxing them..."

This is off topic for this change. I don't like app store duopoly but this is just applying real forex for their rate. Still it could be said that it's pain that we can't price for each currency, for who want to price like Steam (make it cheap for Turkey). It seems that Google Play supports it?

One purpose of taxes is to raise the prices of some products relative to others, encouraging consumption of some over others.

The statement is correct, but I reckon the interpretation is not.

If a company has reached the dominance of being taxed above average (or fined) due to their market behavior, them continuing to take the same money from the consumer SHOULD create room for other entrants in the same market-segment to balance the competition.

If a company has reached such a state in a major market-segment that it can simply forward all additive costs for anti-competitive or market-dominating behavior to the consumer without consequences in sales, it probably means that the company is already way too big and should have been regulated much earlier...

However, I doubt that anything like this is at play here.

You can't tax a company you hate higher unless you make the market closed, and it has much more of country defining change than just being anti Apple. Fining a company also has a negative consequence as it makes less rewarding for small company to grow, which is directly evident by startup funding in US vs Europe.

> You can't tax a company you hate higher unless you make the market closed,

so it's okay to substantutivaly reduce their tax burden as done today but not to increase it because that would mean a closed market?

> Fining a company also has a negative consequence as it makes less rewarding for small company to grow

There's so many more differences than just 'fines', I don't think you can draw that simple a conclusion.

Don't know where "hate" and "Anti-Apple" is coming from. For sure, everything can have positive and negative consequences, it's rarely clear-cut.

It's also not about taxing a specific company, taxes are used to discourage/incentivize certain movement in a market.

If you (an individual) pay higher tax for using fossil fuels than renewable energy, you are incentivized to use renewable energy.,

If you have the option to tax-deduct your retirement plan, you are incentivized to invest in a retirement plan.

In a just system, a FINE is ordered for breaking rules. I doubt that fining a company for i.e. anti-competitive behavior makes it "less rewarding" for small companies in the same space to grow. Moreover, those small companies were likely affected by those anti-competitive behaviors, as they were competitors.

> makes less rewarding for small company to grow

I think there's a very big space for a small company/startup to grow before it'd attain the same level of scrutiny by Govs as Apple

Not entirely true because this assumes people continue to consume the same amount. The provided value of the service is unchanged, so you would expect some drop in purchase as the price goes up.

Luckily for Apple the choice for alternatives is small as long as you're trapped within the Apple Ecosystem. And changing the ecosystem is hard for most so now it's just the exercise to find out how much you can rise the price before people jump ship. I'm quite sure there is much room left for people who are ready to pay $1000 for a phone.

It seems to me that almost all app spend is optional. Sure, there is no other App Store to buy from on the iphone, but just buying less apps overall is an option that people will take.

Yes, optional, but I do not think this increment will deter people from buying apps...

I'd say that the people our (European) governments are spending most of the tax money on aren't necessarily the biggest users of Apple hardware...

There is nothing with "the result of a law trying to get some of the money the big Techs make in Europe".

There is nothing new here in Europe. It is what it is for 5 years now. What is different than before is the inflation and the massive devaluation of the EUR against the USD over the last year. That is the reason why the new iPhone 14 prices sharply increased in EUR.

The change with the tax only applies to Vietnam. To my knowledge as a European citizen, Vietnam is far far away from Europe and not anywhere near. I know, that US people have problems with Geography.

My googling doesn't show any quote that resembles that, can you give a source?

Quick google as a service (I do not subscribe to Friedman's opinion)

- Who Really Pays Business Taxes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDqVDw9qfH4

> The elementary fact is that “business” does not and cannot pay taxes. Only people can pay taxes. Corporate officials may sign the check, but the money that they forward to Internal Revenue comes from the corporation’s employees, customers or stockholders. A corporation is a pure intermediary through which its employees, customers and stockholders cooperate for their mutual benefit.

Newsweek column from 1971-11-29 according to https://www.americanexperiment.org/milton-friedman-on-corpor...

Ok thanks, seems like I just suck and googling.

I would point out though that including stockholders into that quote makes it very different. I mean to me that is equivalent to the company paying the taxes.

The thing is, sometimes the company can get away with transferring the cost of taxes 1:1 to the consumer. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the case of apps, the increment in price will be small (the prices are normally low anyway) so transferring the tax to the buyer is trivial.

I think the idea is that at the end of the day, the money always come from individuals - that companies aren’t some nebulous, ethereal entities with no connection to real people, and so you should keep those individuals in mind when levying taxes.

(I’m personally pro taxes in general, including for corporations).